Same oven, every time
One oven, one temperature, one flour for dusting, the same margherita on every base. If the bakes are not identical, the comparison is not a comparison.
Independent pizza testing · United Kingdom
We buy it, bake with it, and publish what we find.
Crust Bench tests what you buy to make pizza at home — dough delivered to your door first, then flour, bases, ovens, stones and peels. Everything is bought at retail, tested on the same bench and scored the same way, and every price and ingredient we quote is linked to the page it came from.
We started with delivered pizza dough because it is the category with the least honest information in it. Eighteen British brands will post you dough balls. Their websites tell you it is artisan, slow-fermented and made with love. None of them tell you what a pizza actually costs once delivery lands, and six of the eighteen still will not tell you what is in it.
18Brands logged on the bench
£0.83Cheapest dough ball, before delivery
12 of 18Publish a full ingredients list
2 of 5Gluten-free doughs with a certification claim
5 of 18Hold a Great Taste award
£1.20Cheapest supermarket pizza, for comparison
We read the reviews so you do not have to — and we show you where each one came from. For every product on the bench we go and find what customers have actually said, on the seller’s own site and at the retailers that stock it, and we record the rating and the number of people behind it, per source, with the date. We never blend them into one number. A 5.0 from nine people and a 4.7 from seven hundred are not the same fact, and a single averaged score hides exactly the thing you need to know.
What that turns up is often the story. Of the eighteen delivered doughs we track, six publish no customer rating at all, and six more show star graphics or review counts with no score you can actually compare. Three fall back to a company-wide Trustpilot or Reviews.io figure, which measures the courier as much as the dough. Just three publish a product star rating with the count behind it — and the best supported of those is East Pizzas at 4.7 from 739 reviews. None of it is our verdict. Ours arrive only when we have bought the dough, baked it twice and eaten it — which so far is true of seven of them. Those carry a verdict block in our own words, with a byline. Everything else carries an empty verdict, honestly.
And the price you see is never the price you pay. Delivery is charged per order, not per pizza, so the cheapest dough depends entirely on how many you buy and where you live. Our cost calculator works it out from the same figures as the tables — including which brands quietly will not deliver to Northern Ireland or the islands at all.
Finding 001 · Gluten free
Two gluten-free doughs. One ingredients list. A 27% price gap.
We read the declarations on every gluten-free pizza dough sold direct in Britain. Two of them are, word for word and in the same order, the same product — sold under two labels at very different prices.
Ooni UK
8 × 250g · £25.95 · £3.24 a ball
Rice starch, corn starch, water, sea water, potato starch, rice flour, sunflower oil, extra virgin olive oil, legume flour (peas), vegetable fiber (potato, rice, psyllium, flax, lemon, pea), sugar, millet flour, linseed oil cake flour, salt, fresh brewer's yeast, natural flavours, thickener: hydroxypropyl methylcellulose. Raising agents: glucono delta-lactone, sodium acid carbonate.
Chefs for Foodies
12 × 250g · £49.50 · £4.13 a ball
Rice starch, corn starch, water, sea water, potato starch, rice flour, sunflower oil, extra virgin olive oil, legume flour (peas), vegetable fiber (potato, rice, psyllium, flax, lemon, pea), sugar, millet flour, whole flaxseed meal, salt, fresh brewer's yeast, natural flavours. Thickener: hydroxypropyl methylcellulose. Raising agents: Gluconodeltalactone, sodium hydrogen carbonate.
Both declarations quoted verbatim from the sellers' own product pages, September 2026. Read to the end, the lists differ in two places, and both are naming rather than substance: "linseed oil cake flour" against "whole flaxseed meal", and "sodium acid carbonate" against "sodium hydrogen carbonate" — the same compound written two ways. We have not asked either company to confirm a shared manufacturer, and neither has claimed one. What we can say is what is printed: the lists match, the prices do not.
What we have logged so far
Every figure below is taken from the seller's own pages. Cost per pizza is ours: pack price plus standard UK delivery, divided by the number of balls. Where a brand does not publish delivery cost or ball weight, we say so rather than guess.
Open the full comparison →What a pizza base costs, by how much work you do
Every route to a 12″ base, cheapest first. The gap between the ends of this ladder is roughly ten to one.
Flour, water, salt, yeast27–45p
Dough mix£1.08–£2.00
Supermarket dough£1.20–£1.50
Dough delivered83p–£2.58
Ready-made base£1.78–£3.75
Gluten-free dough delivered£3.24–£4.13
Per base, before delivery. Flour assumes 150g a ball. Ranges span the cheapest and dearest option we have priced in each category.
We pay for everything
No press samples, no gifted boxes, no brand sending us their best batch. Every ball on this bench was bought at the price you would pay.
Sources, not summaries
Prices, ingredients and allergen claims are quoted and linked to the page they came from, with the date we read it.